Making Abolition Geography: Social Justice Organizing in Local, State and International Perspective
UW Discovery Building 330 N. Orchard St., Madison, Wisconsin 53715
press release: Ruth Wilson Gilmore's talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. Highlights include: environmental justice, public sector labor unions, rural workers, undocumented long-distance migrants, community based approaches to prevent and resolve domestic and interpersonal violence, militant education, and organizing from within prison walls. The vivid stories show that abolition is a practical program for urgent change based in the needs, talents, and dreams of vulnerable people. Her Humanities Without Boundaries talk is presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A co-founder of many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she works on racial capitalism, organized violence, organized abandonment, changing state structure, criminalization, and labor and social movements. Current projects include a second edition of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Recent publications include Beyond Bratton (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds.), and Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds.). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017). Novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in a New York Times Magazine feature article (17 April 2019).